MLB Daily Notes - May 20
A daily automated report of what happened yesterday in Major League Baseball, along with other recent trends and further analysis
Check out yesterday’s box scores here
The Daily Notes are the flagship resource of MLB Data Warehouse. Every morning, Jon breaks down the current goings on in the fantasy baseball world, and an automated daily report gets you up to date on key stats and trends. Become a paid subscriber at MLB Data Warehouse to get this unlocked in your inbox every morning!
Bo Bichette shook off some of that bad luck with a two-homer game. It’s been a tough luck season for Bo.
→ .224 AVG, .282 xBA
→ .274 wOBA, .333 xwOBA
The green xwOBA line has been above the red wOBA line all year long:
Here are your unluckiest hitters by this xwOBA and wOBA gap:
There’s a tab on the main dashboard for “wOBA Moving Avg”, and a smaller version of it is on the Hitter Profile pages.
I look at them a lot. Some people think that you can predict the future by looking at rolling plots. Thinking that every downturn will soon go up. But you can never know what the end of season plot will look like, so I think it’s useless to try to use the curves themselves as a predictor of the next few weeks.
But the key point here is the white space between the red and green line. xwOBA is more predictive of future wOBA than wOBA is.
Let’s look at last year for a second. Exactly one year ago, Salvador Perez was the least lucky hitter in the league with a .350 xwOBA and a .250 wOBA. Here’s what the rolling wOBA plot looked like when the season concluded:
So two big spikes in the xwOBA. The wOBA line (red) didn’t follow the first time, but it did follow the second time and he ended having a perfectly fine season.
I wondered if the Brewers were keen to this, because Andrew Vaughn was the second most unlucky hitter in the league behind Perez for those first two months, and then the White Sox demoted him.
The Brewers ended up getting great production from him.
So that’s how you use this data and these plots. Find the guys with big gaps recently and buy/sell depending on which direction it’s going.
You can pick whatever date range you want. Here’s the last 30 days:
Seems like Mark Vientos has gotten ripped off a lot lately.
So he’d be guy to target. What we can’t guarantee is that the xwOBA keeps rolling the way it does. But if it does, we know the wOBA will follow eventually.
I don’t have the most time today. But there are a few pitchers we have to get to! I should quickly hat tip Chase Burns for going into Philly and throwing six innings with 9:0 K:BB and allowing just one run on three hits. Sick stuff there.
I’m continually sick and beaten down by Reid Detmers. He got 19 whiffs for a 20.7% SwStr% yesterday with a very nice 8:2 K:BB. But again:
→ 5.67IP 8H 8ER 8R 8K 2BB
Beats me, man.
Kinda the same story with Ben Brown:
→ 5.0IP 7H 3ER 3R 6K 2BB
Bad box score line, but 15 whiffs, an 18.3% SwStr% and a 31.7% Ball%. Really good underlying numbers but bad results for both guys. It was 82 pitches for Brown, so we’re confirming now that the Cubs want to try him as a traditional starter. I’m very interested and I think I’d add him in any sort of deep or deepish league.